Professional Documents
Culture Documents
or Basic Instinct...
Dozens of Top Pros Give
Up Their Aiming Secrets
By Shari J. Stauch
Photos By Francine Massey
hen I was eleven or twelve
years old, I began hitting
the balls around on the
eight foot home table in the
downstairs rec room of our home. Soon
after, my father decided to teach me some
fundamentals of the game you know,
the stuff everybody's got to get through
like stance, bridge, stroke, and yes, aim.
For practice, he'd draw up diagrams of
shots for me, indicating with a broken line
cue ball where the object ball should be hit
for each shot. It was in this manner that I
learned to aim mostly by what is commonly called the "ghost ball" theory today.
Later, when he opened the billiard club
(okay, in 1976 it was still a pool hall), I
had the benefit of hearing what many of
the great, and not so great, players
thought about how to aim. In fact, it was a
regular topic of discussion at Harold's, and
new theories were tested weekly among
the regulars; some plausible, others, well,
just plain silly.
But the most interesting thing to come
out of listening to all those theories and
watching their careful experiments was
that everyone seemed to have a slightly
different way of aiming that worked for
them. Nevertheless, they were all still
searching for that perfect method, the elusive "secret of pool" that would magically
keep them from missing, ever.
Loree Jon Jones - "Aiming comes naturally for me, where I've always
just know where to hit. It's very difficult for me to teach people to aim
because of this."
Basic Instincts
change the point of aim. With outside english, you aim a sixteenth of an inch fuller
on the object ball than you normally
would. But, all bets are off when using a
soft stroke, because of deflection, etc."
Efren Reyes, ranked #5 and winner of
last month's Sands Regency title, further
explains. "When you put a lot of english on
the cue ball you adjust a little bit, often
aiming exactly at the contact point of an
object ball. So it very much depends on my
next shot how I will aim."
Sammy Jones, pro player and husband/coach of Loree Jon Jones, agrees. "It
depends on the shot itself. When aiming
at a straight-in shot, you're aiming both
balls directly in the center. If aiming at a
thin cut shot, you imagine the edge of the
cue ball hitting the edge of the object ball."
Offering a more detailed explanation is
new P&B Mag instructional guru Ray
Martin, a BCA Hall of Fame player with
three world titles to his credit. According
to Ray, "I use parts of the cue ball. In
other words, if you were to have a
straight-in shot, you're aiming with the
middle of the cue ball to the middle of the
object ball. Now let's say the object ball
stays in the same place and you move the
cue ball six inches to the left. Now you're
aiming with only a part of the cue ball. If
you've got a real thin cut, now you're aiming with the edge of the cue ball. I'm not
going to stress 1/2 ball, 1/4 ball here,
because that's way too broad the difference could be two degrees or a sixteenth of
an inch! The important thing to remember
is the spot on the object ball never
changes. It is a constant."
On
Cue
Look Away...
Jeff Carter continued his explanation
by explaining which ball he looks at last,
which brought up a whole other topic of
discussion, one that most pros had a definite opinion on. According to Carter,
"What you look at first or last, the cue ball
or object ball, varies from shot to shot. On
a long shot, of course I'm going to watch
the cue ball go up to the object ball. Let
your eyes do what they want to do naturally, but keep your head down, that's
what's most important."
Michelle Adams leans towards the
more popular theory of looking at the
object ball last, "except on the break shot,
or a masse or jump shot, when you need to
pay more attention to where your cue tip
will contact the cue ball."
Sammy Jones opts for honesty. "I wish
I knew! I'd lean towards looking at the
object ball last, but I have never figured
that out. What's interesting to note is that
when the top pros line up, Buddy Hall is a
good example, the cue tip is the distance of
a razor blade's width from the cue ball."
Loree Jon then explains that this only